In Goodknight v. County of Douglas, (D OR, Aug. 6, 2024), an Oregon federal district court rejected religious discrimination claims brought by a county jail guard who objected to required LGBTQI Community Training. The training was impelled by the recently enacted federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. According to the court:
Plaintiff alleges this Training required employees “to affirm and validate homosexual unions and the self-proclaimed ‘transgender,’ ‘non-binary,’ or ‘genderqueer’ identities of AICs and fellow employees.”...
Plaintiff concluded by confirming his believe that “PREA standards demands [sic] we deny, [sic] God, science, and the common sense verified by our very eyes. This is a Pandora’s box of perversion I refuse to help open. I appeal to you one last time, please repent of this sinful path for the sake of the county, inmates, and my fellow deputies....
Rejecting plaintiff's claims under Title VII and state law, the court said in part:
Despite Plaintiff’s attempt, intentionally or otherwise, to conflate private citizen cases with public employee cases, the fact that the dispute here concerned training regarding how Defendant processed and housed LGBTQI+ individuals—i.e., that the Training concerned how Defendant wanted Plaintiff to perform his basic job duties—demonstrates Plaintiff’s free speech claim necessarily fails. ...
Plaintiff’s specific factual allegations, along with the Court’s own common sense, confirm that the speech here concerned nothing more than Plaintiff’s dispute with his supervisors over how to perform his job when dealing with certain AICs....
Plaintiff alleges Defendant violated his rights under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause when Defendant “lent it’s power to one side in a controversy over religious dogma – specifically, the controversy over whether what [sic] constitutes respectful treatment of persons who self-identify as LGBTQI+.”... This argument is meritless. ...
Plaintiff’s attempt to conflate ‘government employers forcing their employees’ with “the government forcing its citizens’ ignores longstanding, black‐letter law recognizing that “[a] public employer ‘may impose restraints on the job-related speech of public employees that would be plainly unconstitutional if applied to the public at large.’”
